Uber's Product Chief Wants Fewer Things Done Better, Starting With Robotaxis and Your Bank Account

Key points

• Uber Chief Product Officer Sachin Kansal outlined the company's financial-services ambitions in a 2025 interview with TechCrunch AI.
• Uber is building an operation called AV Labs to sell or license data from its rides network to other companies.
• The company's partnership with Waymo, the self-driving car unit owned by Alphabet (Google's parent), is growing more complicated as both firms compete for the same passengers.
• Kansal said Uber does not want to be "everything for everyone," signalling a tighter focus on core transport and delivery.

Uber has spent years adding features: groceries, alcohol, medicine, even pets. The company's head of product says that era is ending.

Sachin Kansal told TechCrunch AI that Uber is pulling back from trying to serve every possible need. The phrase he used: the company should not be "everything for everyone." Doing fewer things well beats doing many things badly.

What does this mean for people who use Uber every day?

For regular riders, the most visible changes will come from AI features baked into the app. Kansal described artificial intelligence showing up in ways that are practical: smarter route suggestions, better estimated arrival times, and tools that help drivers earn more steadily by predicting where demand will spike.

For drivers, that last part matters most. An algorithm that flags a nearby surge before it happens is worth real money to someone working on their own schedule.

On the financial side, Uber wants to become something closer to a bank for its drivers: instant pay, credit products, savings tools built into the driver app. Drivers in many markets are independent contractors with no employer benefits, so Uber sees a gap it can fill and profit from.

Then there's the Waymo question. Waymo operates driverless taxis, robotaxis with no human behind the wheel, in cities including San Francisco and Phoenix. Uber has a deal to offer Waymo rides through its own app in some markets, generating passengers for Waymo while keeping Uber relevant in the self-driving space without building its own vehicles.

But the relationship is complicated. Waymo could one day build its own app and cut Uber out entirely. Kansal didn't pretend otherwise.

To prepare, Uber is standing up AV Labs, a new operation that collects and packages the enormous stream of data generated by millions of daily trips. That data, covering traffic patterns and rider behaviour, is valuable to any company training self-driving software. Uber plans to sell or license it. AI2Day first covered AV Labs on 14 July 2026 when the operation was announced.

It's a quiet pivot. Instead of just moving people, Uber becomes the company that knows how cities move and charges others to learn from that knowledge.

The AI features, the financial products, the data business: none of them require Uber to manufacture a single vehicle. That's probably the point. What to watch is whether Waymo decides it no longer needs the distribution.